How to Set Up a Proxy Server
Finding how to set up a proxy server is important if you ever want to become a power user. The word “proxy” means “substitute” or anything that serves as an agent, an enabler. In case of telecommunication, it is used for a device or program empowered to act for another. In computer networks, a proxy server is a server,which acts as a mediator for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. The requester is known as the client, and has to go through the proxy in order to get anything. The proxy server analyzes the request according to its filtering rules. The most common example of filtering is by IP address or protocol.
When you want to set up a proxy server, a wide variety of choices exist out there. You might start by checking out one of the most popular proxys on the market, a piece of software called WinProxy. The main reason for its popularity is that no software needs to be installed on the client systems. NAT is available since WinProxy is a transparent proxy. This ensures that the client system is unaware of the proxy server’s existence. WinProxy acts just like any other server, dealing with security issues and all the various protocols online – except when it needs to serve as a substitute, a proxy.
Getting it going is fairly simple and quick to do. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better alternative to set up a proxy server. Just make sure to take common initial steps such as installing TCP/IP on your network. When all that’s been done, you can go on to WinProxy itself. Which, by the way, is available on-demand as a file download. Now once you fire up WinProxy for the first time, you should use the included setup wizard for ease and peace of mind. Like most such wizards, you’ll be prompted for your produce license serial number right away. The next two screens gathers information about the type of Internet connection that will be used- dial-up or broadband. Under certain rare circumstances you may have to denote such information yourself. Then comes the login info – namely, username and password. Just leave everything else to the program to handle. Now perhaps the best thing of all is how it will make an internal LAN address into an anonymous IP address. What your ISP assigned for your modem or router winds up being the external address. This external address is what someone else will see when his system requests something from yours. And that’s it! WinProxy will handle everything else. Simple, just like that.